Jonathan Beecher Field, an Obama supporter and English professor at Clemson, has written a devastating op-ed at InsideHigherEd.com on the subject of Joe Biden’s plagiarism. The article concludes that Biden’s plagiarism “suggests something of Biden’s character, indeed, in a realm more relevant to doing his job than was John Edwards’s philandering to his.” While Biden’s plagiarism of a speech by the British Labour party leader Neil Kinnock is fairly well-known, the professor notes that Biden’s plagiarism in law school is more troubling. This E.J. Dionne article from 1987 examines the depth of Biden’s dishonesty:
The file distributed by the Senator [in response to reports of his plagiarism] included a law school faculty report, dated Dec. 1, 1965, that concluded that Mr. Biden had ”used five pages from a published law review article without quotation or attribution” and that he ought to be failed in the legal methods course for which he had submitted the 15-page paper. The plagiarized article, ”Tortious Acts as a Basis for Jurisdiction in Products Liability Cases,” was published in the Fordham Law Review of May 1965. Mr. Biden drew large chunks of heavy legal prose directly from it, including such sentences as: ”The trend of judicial opinion in various jurisdictions has been that the breach of an implied warranty of fitness is actionable without privity, because it is a tortious wrong upon which suit may be brought by a non-contracting party.”… In his paper, Mr. Biden included a single footnote to the Fordham Law Review article. In a letter defending himself, dated Nov. 30, 1965, Mr. Biden pleaded with the faculty not to dismiss him from the school. ”My intent was not to deceive anyone,” Mr. Biden wrote. ”For if it were, I would not have been so blatant.” At another point, the young Mr. Biden said that ”if I had intended to cheat, would I have been so stupid?”’
Good question. How could a guy who told a constituent that he graduated in the top half of his law school class and had a “much higher IQ than you” intentionally do something so stupid? Dionne’s report provides some clues:
The faculty ruled that Mr. Biden would get an F in the course but would have the grade stricken when he retook it the next year. Mr. Biden eventually received a grade of 80 in the course, which, he joked today, prevented him from falling even further in his class rank. Mr. Biden, who graduated from the law school in 1968, was 76th in a class of 85. The file also included Mr. Biden’s transcript from his days as an undergraduate at the University of Delaware. In his first three semesters, his grades were C’s or D’s, with three exceptions: two A’s in physical education courses, a B in a course on ”Great English Writers” and an F in R.O.T.C. The grades improved somewhat later but were never exceptional.
